How to Communicate Your Product Roadmap to Stakeholders

As a Product Manager, the Product Roadmap is your greatest tool for tracking and communicating both long-term strategy and short-term objectives. Just like with any other product, though, we want to maximize the value our roadmap creates for its users without unnecessary time or effort. To that end, we will look at 7 hacks Product Managers use to effectively and efficiently communicate their Product Roadmaps to the organization. Before we jump in, let us define the main goals of a Product Roadmap and who the users will be.

Goals of the Product Roadmap

A survey of Product Managers was done in September 2015 by Jim Semick’s team at ProductPlan that revealed the following top goals of Product Roadmaps:

1. Communicating Product Strategy
2. Planning & Prioritizing Products and Features
3. Reaching Consensus on Product Direction
4. Communicating Milestones
5. Managing Product Backlogs

The hacks you choose should align with the goals you are trying to achieve with your roadmap.

Users of the Roadmap

The following are the most common audiences (or “users”) of Product Roadmaps:

1. Executives
2. The Product Team
3. Engineering
4. Customer-facing Teams (Sales, Marketing, Customer Support)
5. Customers (Typically in Enterprise software)

Stages of the Roadmap

The following are the stages of Product Roadmap development. Each stage will require a roadmap communication with a different level of detail and audience.

1. Planning - Executive and Product teams align on strategy, goals, and high-level themes for the roadmap.
2. Prioritizing - The Product team gathers inputs from other teams and prioritizes initiatives on the roadmap.
3. Executing - Engineering and other teams use a more detailed roadmap to track tasks, deadlines, and progress.
4. Releasing - All teams use the roadmap to understand overall context and plan for go-to-market, customer-facing, and other release initiatives.
5. Reviewing - Executive teams and the rest of the organization use roadmap reviews to understand changes to the roadmap and the outcomes of previous releases.

Understanding what each team wants at each stage will help you choose the best and leanest method of communicating the Product Roadmap to that team. The following are seven strategic hacks organized by medium. They include the stage of Product Roadmap creation, the audiences they will address, and what those users want.